Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I was amused at the number of folks who thought Pern was fantasy. It has a feudal society, medieval technology, fire breathing dragons... If you come in in the middle of the series, you miss the setup that Pern is a lost colony, man arrived by starship, and the fire breathing dragons are products of genetic engineering on the indigenous fire lizards, and it appeared that's precisely what many readers did.
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She does mention the Pern colony origin in a preface to
Dragonflight, but I think it's not until the sixth book (
The White Dragon) that we actually get any information about this prior colony, and not until
Dragondawn (8th? 9th?) that we get information about genetic engineering. In
The Reader's Guide to Science Fiction, the reviewers write that she tends to leave scientific explanations of her world to others, and that was true at the time (mid-seventies). I personally didn't feel that her scientific explanations, even when provided, were very strong, and certainly didn't think they were the strongest part of her work.
I agree with bbusybookworm that the Harper Hall books, including
The Masterharper of Pern, were the best of the lot. Her interest in and knowledge of music really strengthened those books, without getting in the way of some excellent characterization. While I will occasionally re-read some of her other books, those are the ones I return to over and over.
Asking fans to copyright books in her name as well as their own is a good way of avoiding the "fanfiction plagiarism" problem from the direction you mention, as well as requiring fans to acknowledge her contribution to the fanfiction.
I wonder if/how that was implemented for PernMUSH?